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Carter’s Rhetoric of Apartheid

By The New York Times December 13, 2006 9:43 amDecember 13, 2006 9:43 am

Former President Jimmy Carter is answering a lot of questions about his book “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid” (Photo: Paul Connors/Associated Press)

The controversy following Jimmy Carter’s new book “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid” continued this week, with the former president arguing on news talk shows that the book’s loudest critics are attacking its title and not its content.

Speaking yesterday to NPR’s Leonard Lopate — who noted he had only once received more protests about having a guest on his show (that was when when Jane Fonda stopped by) — Mr. Carter said that the book was being maligned by people who hadn’t read it:

Most of the people that seem to be critical have not read the book, or they haven’t referred to anything inside Palestine, and the book is not written about Israel at all. I know that Israel is a wonderful democracy with equal treatment of all citizens whether Arab or Jew. And so I very carefully avoided talking about anything inside Israel. The book is about Palestine and what’s going on inside the occupied territories….

I have spent a lot of time in Palestine in recent years. … The Palestinians have had their own land, first of all, occupied and then confiscated and then colonized. They’ve been excluded from their own gardens and fields, and pastures and churches. They have been severely restrained in their movements. They have to have different kinds of passes to go through different checkpoints inside their own lands on their own roads. The Israelis have built more than 200 settlements inside Palestine. They connect these settlements with very nice roads for the Israeli settlers, and then superhighways and so forth going into Jerusalem. Quite often the Palestinians are prevented from even riding on those roads that have been built in their own territory. So this has been in many ways worse than it was in South Africa. Of course, there were many more horrible atrocities in South Africa, but the word apartheid is quite pertinent.

Appearing on CNN this morning, Mr. Carter told Soledad O’Brien that Israel would have peace if it simply withdrew from the Palestinian territories.
Needless to say, the book — and Mr. Carter’s positions — have both been drawing heat. The Anti-Defamation League has launched a full-frontal assault, with advertising campaigns in major newspapers suggesting that “Mr. Carter does not advance public debate. He diminishes it.” (A PDF of the ad is available here).

The ADL Web site states: “If only former President Carter would spend a fraction of his time and energy on getting the Palestinians to abandon their self-destructive policies, maybe then there could be some hope for the people of the Middle East.”

Stein, who worked closely with Carter in the 1980s, said the former president’s first error concerns United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. Signed in November 1967, the agreement has been used as the basis for all subsequent Arab-Israeli negotiations.

In his book, Carter writes that the resolution says, “Israel must withdraw from occupied territories” it acquired by force during the Six-Day War in 1967 between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria.

But the word “must” never appears in the actual U.N. resolution text.

Stein argued that each word in the resolution was carefully chosen and by inserting the word “must,” Carter changed the implications of this key resolution.

Mr. Stein is also apparently concerned about smaller errors in the book: Mr. Carter said he met with Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad in Switzerland in June 1977 when the meeting appears to have taken place in May; Mr. Carter writes that Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned in June 1974, though Mr. Stein said she resigned a month earlier.

Carter can explain all he wants, but his words in actions point to the fact that he is no lover of Israel. He has no understanding of why Israel imposes such policies — namely to protect its citizens from a population willing to kill, even using women of all ages. What particularly troublesome is that book publishers have editors that either are lazy or passive to prevent errors and mischaracterizations.

Mr. Carter is a man of peace and courage. He is only trying to begin a dialogue which will result in the peaceful resolution of the Palestinian conflict–the root of Middle East unrest. It is a mark of his statesmanship that he must endure such criticism from such small minded people who not only have no interest in bringing peace to the Middle East but actually profit from the current situation.

I believe President Carter is right on in his comments. Israel should withdraw totally from the West Bank and turn the Israeli settlements over to the Palestinians. Until Israel does this there is no hope for peace in the Middle East.

Thank you, Jimmy Carter, for bringing up what others won’t talk about which is the treatment of the Palestinians. Under Likud Israel has insisted upon a policy in which it only cares that it is feared not respected. We have adopted the same policy and it has led us to abandon our principles. The Israeli lobby doesn’t want people to realize what Israel does to the Arabs and this is one of the main reasons we and the Europeans are so far apart – here, they have been successful.

shame on the ADL. they declare that hope would be acheived if the palestinians “abandoned their self-distructive policies” indicates to me that the ADL is keeping blinders on by placing blame on only one party.

god bless this land.at some point in time people can see the truth.the americangiant is up now to find the truth about this horrible ocupation and ethnic cleansing which is taking place in palestine.i wanted to get the book yestrday in awell knownliobrary in manhattan i could not find acopy .either it was sold or was been bought by some resisting groups.groups they have no respect for human life ,peace,or thrir own presedent.

This outrage against the former President is an example of the unreasonable Pro-Israeli rhetoric that pervades our country. We rarely see the deep oppression that is facing the Palestinan people. However, any type of violence against the Israelis is splashed over the New York Times in all of its horror. As a result the U.S. people have a skewed understanding of what is going on in Israel and the occupied territories. The utter humiliation the Palestinian people have to deal with on a daily basis should receive equal time in our nation’s media.
I support anyone, especially someone as heroric as Jimmy Carter, who wants to expand the dialogue on the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

Ugh. Jimmy Carter sounds reasonable and thoughtful in these quotes. And his work to foster not just peace but social and economic justice means we should hear him out on these issues, some of the most pressing our country faces on the foreign policy front. Abe Foxman, meanwhile, sounds like an idiot, spouting nothing new, and with little critical reasoning behind his words. He’s the one who isn’t advancing the debate.

Thank you, President Carter, for having the courage and honesty to call it like it is. Israeli imperialism and human rights abuses, with U.S. complicity, are largely responsible for the current deplorable state of Israeli-Arab affairs. The storm of protest over this book is an example of what happens when the truth is told.

“Meanwhile, the debate over the book unfolds, strangely, against the backdrop of the bizarre symposium in Tehran this week, which seeks to discuss whether the Holocaust actually happened.”

Strangely? Maybe the reason such “bizarre symposiums” are being held at this point in history is a result of the ideological cover provided in the West by left leaning intellectuals, politicians, etc., who in recent years, have felt more and more comfortable voicing their blind anti-semitism. Nothing strange about the convergence at all.

Carter is exactly right; it is apartheid. Attacking Carter about the choice of a word is a red herring. The elephant in the room is the theft of people’s lands, the destruction of their homes, and their reduction to statelessness. I have no sympathy anymore for the state of Israel, and have come to the view that most of the ills we face today arising from terrorism find their inception in the arrogant attitude of Zionism which we have aided and abetted.

Congratulations to President Carter for the title of his book. It puts the Palestianian problem in focus as it should be. The negative reaction to his book is a demonstration of the power of Israel in America. No other sovereign power has as much influence on American life than does Israel. America is also a soveriegn power and our foreign policy should not be dictated by Israel.

There is a great deal of truth to what President Carter says about the treatment of Palestinians.
When I was in Israel several years ago and hired a Palestinian guide to help us visit and appreciate Jerusalem, the look of fear on his face when he thought that our car was going to be stopped by an Israeli policemen was classic.
Special license plates for Palestinian cars. Being able to see your destination and taking 4 hours to get there because of the wall and checkpoints.
Constant harassment and poor treatment. Palestinians as a group being defined by the Israeli military at checkpoints as “dangerous people”.
This has the smack of apartheid and has got to end if peace will ever return to Israeli/Palestine

President Carter’s book as well as his media appearances related thereto serve to stoke a discussion regarding Israel and Palestine which I feel is absolutely necessary. We must not accept the presentations/pontifications either of our government officials or of the mass media without question and dialogue. Thank you, Mr. President, for helping facilitate this.

Unfortunately the truths that are in Carter’s book are now being ignored for the kind of “Did so, did not” childish retorts that have characterized the Israeli/Palestinian debate for a half century. The United States must become a more active partner in formulating a new direction. It is disingenuous to sell arms to one side and cut off money to the other and then say that nothing is our fault.

President Carter’s remarks about the Israeli occupation of Palestine are well overdue. Only a person of his stature has the power to be heard. A signficant part of the American public is indifferent to foreign news and most of the people discussing his points will be part of the US Israeli lobby and its friends. As Carter points out most Israelis regret the occupation of Palestine as well as do most people in most parts of the world. I hope others will raise their voices against this terrible injustice.

Perhaps we are beginning to see the middle ground between the fanatics on either side. While there may be factual errors in Mr. Carter’s book (which I have not read), there appears to be too much truth to ignore. Whatever the issues regarding Palestinian behavior, Israel cannot claim the high moral ground. Likewise, the absurd Holocaust conference in Iran would seem to undermine Islamic moral claims. If Iran can sponsor such a conference, then there can be no complaints from them about Danish cartoons.

Mr. Carter states that there would be peace if Israel simply withdrew form the territories. If only that were true. How many times do we have to hear statements from elected Hamas members that there will be no peace at all with Israel in any matter shape or form before people like Mr. Carter believes them? Israel withdrew completely from Gaza and instead of working towards statehood, the Palestinians immediately starting firing rockets into pre-1967 Israeli territory. Mr. Carter’s different version of reality is what makes him so dangerous.

What is truly astonishing is that while the US claims to be a beacon of hope, liberty, and justice, our policies (and tax dollars) continue to support Israel’s settlement activity and occupation of Palestinians.

Somehow our leaders do not grasp the disconnect between our rhetoric and our policies, and refuse to work for the obvious (elimination of collective punishment, freedom of movement WITHIN Palestinian lands, elimination of detentions without charges). This disconnect does tremendous damage to the US standing internationally, and in the Middle East.

We should thank Jimmy Carter for picking up this hot potato! We need to get discussions going in this country, instead of filling up our living rooms with sacred cows and elephants. Way to go, Jimmy! So what if he got two dates wrong by a month. As for UN resolutions, we should pay much more attention to the fact that Israel has ignored most of them, whether they included the word “must” or not.

I praise Jimmy Carter for taking a principled, if unpopular stance. I wonder if some of the apparent outrage in the US media doesn’t stem from the media’s failure to accurately portray the increasingly desperate plight of the Palestinian people; a failure which makes the US media complicit in that suffering.

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